The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Alex Stupak

Alex Stupak is, simply put, one of the most exciting chefs in the country right now. A culinary wunderkind who cooked Thanksgiving dinner for his entire family ate age 14 before scoring a full ride to the Culinary Institute of America, Stupak has, in short order, racked up the experience and accolades of chefs twice his age (he’s only 32).

What’s more impressive is that Stupak’s career doesn’t follow just one arc: He first drew acclaim behind the burners at Chicago’s Tru and Boston’s The Federalist, before his desire to exert more creative control led him to the pastry station instead. After a stint at Boston’s renowned Clio, Stupak got a call from Grant Achatz to head the pastry program at Alinea; from there, he headed to New York to make desserts at Wylie Dufrense’s wd~50. Through it all, he maintained an extremely disciplined devotion to his creative vision, pushing the boundaries of modern pastry to new levels.

And yet…it still wasn’t enough for the ragingly ambitious young chef. Stupak decided in 2011 to switch gears yet again, this time leaving the pastry world to pursue a passion for Mexican cuisine. While it seemed to some like an unlikely pairing at first, his two Empellón restaurants in NYC (Cocina and Taqueria) have proven what everyone should have already known: When Stupak does something, he does it for a reason. His approach to Mexican cooking is thoughtful without ever being precious, and inventive dishes such as wavy masa crisps with sweet shrimp and sea urchin mousse have effectively silenced critics who suggested that he should stick to sweets.

Driven and articulate, Stupak approached the selection of his career-changing dishes with the same careful consideration that goes into everything he creates. Here, he shares his memories of the first dish he ever served another person (red cabbage with Russian dressing for mom), the modernist master who inspired him to pursue pastry, and the transcendent taco experience that changed his professional path.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

1. Pork Milanesa

When I was as a kid in Leominster, Massachusetts, my dad did all the cooking, and he would always let me get involved. Every Friday, he pounded out thin slices of pork tenderloin, dipped them in egg and 4C seasoned breadcrumbs, then fried them in a little FryDaddy kettle. That was where I learned how to properly bread and fry food. I didn’t know what a milanesa was until later, but that’s what my dad was making, even though he just called them cutlets. When I was growing up I thought it was the best dish on earth—I felt super manly because they’re so thin that I could eat a ton of them.

2. Russian Dressing

Not a dish, but one of the first things I ever had the courage to “cook” without supervision. I found it an old '70s cookbook in my house when I was about eight years old. The recipe called for mayo, lemon juice, ketchup, and relish. I used it to dress a red cabbage salad, which I gave to my mom for lunch. She said she loved it. For me, it was important because it put me further down the path of realizing that cooking could make people happy, and I could connect with people that way.

3. Oysters

Growing up, my father pushed me to try new things. Dining options in Leominster weren’t always the most adventurous. He exposed me to a lot of foods that someone at that age in that town didn’t always get to experience. We went to this place The Weathervane—your typical New England seafood place—and he dared me to have my first oyster. I was about 10 years old. My dad always ate them, and one day I asked him what they were like, so he just kept pushing me to try one. For me, it was such a weird texture; it wasn’t like I was hooked on oysters at that moment, but the importance was that at a young age I was willing to try anything. I think that idea of being adventurous is still with me now—anything prepared properly should taste pretty damn good.

4. Thanksgiving Dinner

This is a big one for me. I was 14 or 15 when I decided to cook the entire meal for my family by myself. I was nervous, and I took it extremely seriously. It was the first time I was cooking with time constraints. Cooking on a deadline is a very important thing to understand as a line cook, which I wasn’t yet. The food I made was pretty traditional, but I do remember making a crudité platter, and I was really excited that I knew what a crudité meant. I still cook Thanksgiving for my family every year, but now it’s a little more of a group effort.

Clio was all about intensity. It was five cooks, in a kitchen, wielding a menu that is way bigger than a kitchen that size should have. I was 18 at the time, the youngest guy there. All the other guys were rough around the edges. The most important part of the dish for me was the whipped horseradish crème—that’s what I was in charge of. You had to make a quenelle out of crème with a demitasse spoon and balance it on top of the hot dish. The point is that the crème isn’t allowed to melt—they threw the dish away if it melted, and then the line cooks really started to hate you. So it really taught me speed, and it’s also the first place I learned how to do a quenelle, which was important to me later on as a pastry chef.

6. Raspberry-Red Bell Pepper Sorbet from Pierre Hermé

The sorbet itself is very simple, but the idea was ephiphinal to me. I was aware of chefs trying to juxtapose off flavors, but this was the first time I had [a combination] where it made a ton of sense. When you taste it, you can’t tell where the raspberry ends and the bell pepper begins. It was different for me because it came from a guy who was incredibly creative but wasn’t afraid to create classic things as well. I took from that dish that you can be capable of both, and that’s incredibly admirable. It symbolized the idea that creativity for the sake of creativity isn’t going to be my thing—but creativity that makes sense is worth doing. At that age, I was writing flavor combinations on pieces of paper all night long because they sounded intriguing to me. This dish drove home the idea that there has to be a reason behind it.

7. Albert Adrià's White Chocolate with Mango and Black Olive

When I was still at Clio as an extern, [owner] Ken Oringer gave me a gift—Albert Adrià's first book. This dish was in it. I’ve never actually had it at elBulli, but I made that recipe out of the book, in the basement of Clio on my day off. It’s a white chocolate granita with sauce made out of caramel and olives, and a mango purée. The flavor combination was so aggressive and fearless that when I actually made it and tasted everything together, Albert Adrià immediately became my hero. It was never served to anyone except for myself. But that was a turning point—after that, I was obsessed with Adrià, and even though it took me several years to get to it, I had become obsessed with becoming a pastry chef.

8. Grant Achatz's Beef with Flavors of A-1 at Alinea (Chicago)

This [dish] was the first image of an Alinea dish that I had seen, when I was in the process of leaving Clio to go work for [Grant Achatz] in 2005. It struck fear into me—the quality of the image, the thought process behind the dish, and the beauty of the entire thing made the idea of what I was about to get into very real and very apparent. I thought, I better have my shit together, my desserts better be perfect. I didn’t taste the dish until opening night of the restaurant. On that night, the presentation was entirely different from the image he sent me—still beautiful, still incredible; but it was emblematic to me of a progressive kitchen and constant change. Just because you come up with an idea doesn’t mean the idea should ever stop evolving.

9. Tacos

The first really great tortilla I had was in East L.A. around 2006. My mother-in-law took me out to eat, and the servers basically made the tortillas as they [waited] tables. They were so texturally ephiphinal for me—I realized that everything I had up until that point was garbage. And ever since then, I’ve been taco-obsessed. Tacos are my favorite because they’re the simplest idea—identify an ingredient you’re compelled to eat, cook it well, and put it on a tortilla.

10. Lamb Barbacoa

I had this on my first trip to Oaxaca in 2007, at the Central de Abastos market. The way they do it there is to basically take the whole animal—including the head and most of the organs—and rub it with adobo paste, put the whole thing in a vessel, cover it under avocado leaves, then wrap it in banana leaf. Then, they dig a pit and light a fire, and when the fire goes down to embers, they bury the lamb and let it steam underground for 24 hours. It’s served either in tacos or in consommé, with salsa borracha, and usually green olives too. This was when I was starting to become interested in Mexican cuisine, and I discovered a very unique way of cooking in Oaxaca. Since then, I’ve always had barbacoa on both of my menus.

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